Do blondes have more fun?

In a past life, I was blonde; in fact, my entire university experience had me in full peroxide array. As a perennially broke uni student, I relied entirely on the cheapest box dye and heaps of misplaced ambition, and the results spoke for themselves. Either bright, highlighter orange or white as snow, my hair was so damaged by the experience I'm surprised I still have hair. As this photo attests to, I looked like a cross between a sheep and Pat Butcher.

Thankfully, Buller and Rice were to my rescue. This gorgeous salon in Newington Green has an ecological focus, aiming to reduce the amount of environmentally troublesome chemicals we associate with bleaching. The salon makes extensive use of Davines products, which longtime Because readers already know we're obsessed with.

Arriving at the salon, I was struck immediately by how little it resembled the makeshift salons – normally a friend’s university hall bedroom and a bottle of rosé – with no acrid chemical sting in the air, no sense that you were signing up for a small act of self-harm in the name of vanity. Instead, it was bright, cosy and full of well-kept plants. Upon arrival, I was greeted with a coffee and ice water, which was certainly needed with it being 32 degrees outside!

My lovely colourist Hannah (@hannahpinkshair) started my session with a consultation as to the kind of cut I wanted. I was looking to let the blonde be the main character, so we settled on something long enough to show real dimension through the lengths – soft layers on the top with plenty of texture to play with, while the sides would be short and neat. The results, even before the bleach, were fabulous: seeing the balletic way her scissors moved through my hair put my regular barber to shame. 

Then came the part I'd been dreading slightly: the lift itself. Where my university self went back for round after round of increasingly punishing bleach, with the occasional skin burn to prove it, Hannah did only one round of bleaching, applying it to the shorter sides before moving to the top. Her application was fastidious, separating thin segments of hair to ensure even coverage. I can’t lie: I always find this part of the process nerve-racking, but thankfully the salon playlist had plenty of Scissor Sisters to assuage my nerves. Thankfully, I knew I was in safe hands with Hannah’s nearly two decades of experience, and even though my hair was, at this point, a deeply unpromising shade of orange, I knew to trust the process.

It was worth the nerves. Once the bleach had been rinsed out, Hannah mixed different proportions of toner to get the warm blonde we were looking for. It was remarkable to see her expertise at work, and how much the blending resembled those super-satisfying colour matching videos I watch on Reels. Once the orange had been toned out, what emerged was warm rather than brassy – closer to the peachy, apricot-tinted platinum I'd always longed for than anything I'd ever managed with a box dye. Throughout, Hannah talked me through what she was using – Davines' Beautiful Things treatment on my lengths, which she explained is designed to reinforce the hair's structure mid-process, exactly when a single-session lift is putting the most strain on it. A large part of Buller and Rice's whole ethos is built around minimising exactly the kind of chemical load that turned my student bathroom into something resembling a hazmat site. The Davines range has the dual benefit of both smelling amazing and avoiding all those nasty, environmentally damaging chemicals typical to bleaching hair. 

Hannah finished the appointment by washing my hair with Davines' Chelating shampoo and conditioner – which, she explained, strips away mineral build-up and any residual traces of the lightening process, so the tone sits true rather than shifting brassy again within a week. She gave me a useful note on the stripping qualities of purple shampoo, how it can overcorrect, pushing a peachy blonde into something flat and cold. A final trim, some product for styling and some advice on maintaining the vibrancy and I was done.

So: do blondes have more fun? I'm not sure I'd go quite that far – Marilyn's fun, after all, came with its own well-documented complications, and Barbie's is fictional by design. But there is something undeniably different and joyful about how the world responds to platinum hair, particularly in this lovely spell of sunny weather. It catches the light in a way my natural colour never has; strangers compliment it wherever I go. And there's a specific pleasure in having done the thing properly this time – in walking out of a salon with hair that looks considered rather than survived.

If nothing else, I've learned the lesson my nineteen-year-old self did not absorb: platinum blonde is not a DIY weekend project, and the difference between a colourist who knows what she's doing and a box of bleach from the supermarket is not subtle. Hannah and the team at Buller and Rice gave me back a texture of hair I'd genuinely forgotten was possible after years of self-inflicted damage. Whether or not blondes have more fun, I can say with some confidence that good blondes have considerably less regret. And this summer, catching the sun on a peachy-platinum blow-dry, that feels like enough of a win.